The WUWT Hot Sheet for Wednesday September 4th, 2013

The former vice president [Al Gore] set out to create the Apple Computer of climate change — but instead he’s running the Microsoft. From a sweeping, expensive “blitz” to a “niche” effort in digital media.
…
The numbers, according to a review of the nonprofit’s tax filings, show the change has been severe. In 2009, at its peak, Gore’s group had more than 300 employees, with 40 field offices across 28 states, and a serious war chest: It poured $28 million into advertising and promotion, and paid about $200,000 in lobbying fees at the height of the “cap and trade” energy bill fight on Capitol Hill.

Today, the group has just over 30 people on staff and has abandoned its on-the-ground presence — all of its field offices have since shut down — in favor of a far cheaper digital advocacy plan run out of Washington. Advertising expenses have decreased from the millions to the thousands, and the organization no longer lobbies lawmakers. Donations and grants have declined, too — from $87.4 million in 2008 to $17.6 million in 2011, and many of its high-profile donors have drifted away, one telling BuzzFeed she now sees the group’s initial vision as “very naïve.”…Susie Tompkins Buell, a California-based Democratic donor and one of Hillary Clinton’s closest friends, seeded $5 million in 2007 to the organization, but now says she hasn’t “followed it very much” or contributed since.

Speaking of Absurdium, this columnist at The Atlantic, William R. Polk, blames “climate change” for the chemical weapons incident in Syria.

Syria has been convulsed by civil war since climate change came to Syria with a vengeance. Drought devastated the country from 2006 to 2011. Rainfall in most of the country fell below eight inches (20 cm) a year, the absolute minimum needed to sustain un-irrigated farming. Desperate for water, farmers began to tap aquifers with tens of thousands of new well. But, as they did, the water table quickly dropped to a level below which their pumps could lift it.

In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In others crop failures reached 75%. And generally as much as 85% of livestock died of thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms and fled to the cities and towns in search of almost non-existent jobs and severely short food supplies. Outside observers including UN experts estimated that between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”

According to TVNZ news tonight, the Pacific Forum will make an announcement tomorrow about Global Warming (and rising seas threatening low-lying Pacific atolls) that will make the world sit up and take notice.

You have been warned!

Gosh what could it be? Tuvalu is sinking 6.0? Been there done that, snoarzzz.

===============================================================

NASA: Black soot melted glaciers

“PASADENA, Calif. – A NASA-led team of scientists has uncovered strong evidence that soot from a rapidly industrializing Europe caused the abrupt retreat of mountain glaciers in the European Alps that began in the 1860s, a period often thought of as the end of the Little Ice Age.

The research, published Sept. 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help resolve a longstanding scientific debate.

In the decades following the 1850s, Europe underwent an economic and atmospheric transformation spurred by industrialization. The use of coal to heat homes and power transportation and industry in Western Europe began in earnest, spewing huge quantities of black carbon and other dark particles into the atmosphere.

Black carbon is the strongest sunlight-absorbing atmospheric particle. When these particles settle on the snow blanketing glaciers, they darken the snow surface, speeding its melting and exposing the underlying glacier ice to sunlight and warmer spring and summer air earlier in the year. This diminishing of the snow cover earlier in each year causes the glacier ice to melt faster and retreat. ”

If disaster strikes this hurricane season, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will use an unconventional system to evaluate damage: the ‘Waffle House Index.’

FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate told “The Fine Print” that he started using Waffle Houses as an informal metric of measuring the severity of a storm in its aftermath. He first started using the method in his previous post overseeing emergency management in Florida.

“If the Waffle House was open and had a full menu, it was green because that meant they hadn’t lost power.”

“If [it] was open but had a limited menu, it meant that there were more problems, so they were yellow. And if the store was closed, it was red.”

Black soot may indeed have helped melt glaciers. Nice try. Methinks this is more an attempt to say the LIA never happened. After all, the soot ‘spewed’…and as we all know, when things ‘spew’ it can’t be good. At all.

$200k for lobbyists is a pittance. I worked for a automotive brake company in 2008 trying to get the government contract to supply brake systems on the MRAAPs. We were looking at a $2M contract and paying a lobbyist 10% of it if we got it. And that’s just some little po-dunk brake company no one has ever heard of.

I like the Waffle House index.

Didn’t I leave a note in the “tips and notes” last week about the El Reno tornado :)

I think they are angling for ‘CO2 got us out of the LIA’. From the article: “But glacier records show that between 1860 and 1930, while temperatures continued to drop, large valley glaciers in the Alps abruptly retreated … ”

The article says later: “Something was missing from the equation,” said Thomas Painter, a snow and ice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who led the study. “Before now, most glaciologists believed the end of the Little Ice Age came in the mid-1800s when these glaciers retreated, and that the retreat was due to a natural climatic shift, distinct from the carbon dioxide-induced warming that came later in the 20th century. This result suggests that human influence on glaciers extends back to well before the industrial temperature increases.”

It sounds like they are half way to suggesting it was cold when the glaciers began retreating and only warmed due to CO2 some time later.

This should be easy to prove or disprove. Some distance upstream in the glaciers there is still ice older than 1850. Simply measure the amount of black carbon.
Personally I’m a bit skeptical. This has already been done in Greenland, where the soot is mainly from industrial areas in the northeastern US. There the amount of soot culminates c. 1915 AD and starts to decline – which is also exactly when when the glaciers started retreating due to warmer climate.

But…. but…. but I thought aerosols cooled the climate. But soot causes ice to melt. So, which is it? Both? Neither? Sometimes one or the other? In some places one, in other places the other? It all cancels to zero? (Rhetorical questions of course)

I notice the Syria drought graphic stops in April 2008. I was wondering what happened to their main wheat crop and rain since 2008? It looks like just the weather and not the climate as usual.
2012 Wheat Crop Outlook

…..At the conclusion of USDA’s winter-long crop monitoring effort over Syria, it is apparent that the country has experienced a generally favorable wheat growing season this year, though regional moisture availability and growing conditions have been quite varied. Overall wheat production is estimated a little higher than last year, and about 14 percent above the 5-year average. USDA’s estimate released June 12, 2012 for marketing year 2012/13 wheat production is 4.0 million tons, up 0.15 million or 4 percent from last year……United States Dept. of Agriculture

Since they say the Syria unrest is caused by ‘climate change’ would I be right to conclude the same for Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain etc. Since many of these countries are now calm, can I conclude that ‘climate change’ is now over for them. What a load of horseshit.

This reminds me of the legendary Weather Rock, a rock hanging on a tether:
If the rock is wet, it’s raining.
If the rock is swinging, the wind is blowing.
If the rock casts a shadow, the sun is shining.
If the rock does not cast a shadow and is not wet, the sky is cloudy.
If the rock is not visible, it is foggy.
If the rock is white, it is snowing.
If the rock is coated with ice, there is a frost.
If the ice is thick, it’s a heavy frost.
If the rock is bouncing, there is an earthquake.
If the rock is under water, there is a flood.
If the rock is warm, it is sunny.
If the rock is missing, there was a tornado.
If the rock is wet and swinging violently, there is a hurricane.
If the rock has white splats on it, watch out for birds.

Rabbit, don’t you know all coral atolls are going to dissolve as the oceans acidify?
/sarc off
Fugate did a great job when Florida was smacked by 5 hurricanes in 2 years, including three that dead centered where I live with damage that took two years to repair. He is serious about the Waffle house index, and for good reason. All Waffle Houses are in the hurricane prone Gulf and south east states. They have developed a sophisticated storm response system that even includes a fortified mobile emergency command center. They see it as part or their corporate mission to be able to reliably provide coffee and hot food even if no one else can. There is information about this in serious places like Harvard Business School case studies.

Regarding the retreat of glaciers – I’m going to go ahead and blame that on the lack of what caused them to advance when they did. The LIA was a brief glacier building era and when it ended so too did the advance of glaciers followed shortly be a retreat to pre-LIA levels. What a surprise.

NASA needed another “climate control knob”, (preferably manmade), and presto, soot filled the bill. The double-plus good part is they got to say “It’s a reminder that the actions we take have far-reaching impacts on the environment in which we live.”

They just can’t help themselves, continually conflating environmental concerns with (they hope) climate.

I’ll be satisfied when Gore’s group reaches zero employees and has no digital presence. I’ll be happier when I see articles such as “All theories and hype now disproved as unfounded; IPCC disbands in disgrace’.

March 13, 2013
Climategate 3.0 has occurred – the password has been released

——————————————————————————

I agree.
Is it time those granted access say something?
Is it time for a little clue?
Give those returning to congress something to really worry about.
If there are personal things in there, say so.
If there is absolutely nothing that belongs to the public, that’s okay.
If CG 3 is a bust please let us know.
But mostly those with the key should be up front and honest.
cn

If soot is dark
and dark soot on glaciers absorbes more heat
and more heat makes the glaciers melt a little faster
then why do the glaciers (like the biggest one in Switzerland I recently visited)
not have longitudinal depressions/gulleys where the dark medial morains are, from the phots taken they are big black wide lines stretching from near the top all the way down but I dont see those gulleys.
and I never see the lumps of rock sitting on the top of the glacier sinking into the glacier,
but they are supposed to be hotter and therefors melting the ice so they should NOT be sitting on the top.

With regard to the soot-induced retreat of northern hemisphere galciers, i have seen strong evidence of northern hemisphere chauvanism in my time but this takes the cake, or is that the icing on the cake? Just how do they think that all of the glacier retreats in the mid latitudes of the southern hemisphere (New Zealand, Chile & Argentina) occurred at the same time? We know that large equatorial volcanic eruptions are capable of spreading aerosols into the stratosphere in both hemispheres but we would take a lot of convincing that there was a) enough soot to influence all of the globe’s glaciers at the same time, and b) a suitable mechanism for this to happen!

This is just another cherry picked example of people clutching at straws. Not too dissimilar to the way New Zealand’s leading glacial scientist Trevor Chinn looks at the modern glacial retreat here since he first started photographic logging of them in 1977 and concludes that it is all man’s fault, the retreat that is. All the while ignoring the obvious impact of nature that took out the bulk of the missing mass since 1850!

In a real touch of irony these same scientists acknowledge the impact of positive El Nino’s through the 1980-2000 period in the advancement of the famous West Coast glaciers Franz Josef & Fox, but ignore the possiblity that this same mechanism is detrimental to glaciers on the eastern side of the divide (the Southern Alps) at the same time.

As DWTS is long known for having celebrities trying for a hopeful surge before sliding into celebrity emeritus, this clearly signals an ending of Bill Nye the Climate Science Alarm Guy. Looks like even Gore won’t be hiring him to “fake up” another experiment, if Gore’s nonprofit could still afford it.

First link, to a Seattle TV station, found what looks like a happy find:

Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” who first gained fame as a cast member of KING 5’s Almost Live in the late 80’s and 90’s, will try to break down the science of the ballroom floor.
…Check out some clips of Bill Nye on “Almost Live,” both as “The Science Guy” and the superhero “Speed Walker.”

Science Guy, Speed Walker, and future DWTS washout. Interesting resume for a comedic actor. Good thing it looks like he’ll soon be calling it a career. Don’t worry, after he retires he can still do children’s parties. Is Gail Combs hiring?

*****************************
Tad Chem (8:21am today) — LAUGH-OUT-LOUD. We all need to git us one uh them newfangled rocks. They sell’em down at Joe’s Hardware?

……. and

If there’s a tiny shoe sitting on top of it, a leprechaun was there.

If a flying pig is circling over it, Algore started telling the truth.

If it’s blown to smithereens, one of the “Alllahoo Akkkbar!” Gang thought it was your sculpture of the P. Muckhammed.

If a dour-faced scientist who bears a remarkable resemblance to Homer Simpson is eyeing it closely, you will soon be on TV: “I’m standing here beside the alien spaceship with Tad Chem. Tad, tell me, now, you’ve lived on this beach for over 30 years, when did you first notice the spaceship?”

Regarding that TVNZ article, I too heard the presenter, Barbara Dreaver warn us of this impending Declaration. However, on the TVNZ-on-demand website (article starts at 15:32), this closing part of her article has been cropped. I guess management thought better of it.

By the way, in the same article Dreaver claims: “Scientists say that global warming is causing weather patterns in the area to become more intense, leading to devastating cyclones and tsunamis”

jono1066 says:
September 4, 2013 at 11:23 am
If soot is dark
and dark soot on glaciers absorbes more heat
and more heat makes the glaciers melt a little faster
then why do the glaciers (like the biggest one in Switzerland I recently visited)
not have longitudinal depressions/gulleys where the dark medial morains are, from the phots taken they are big black wide lines stretching from near the top all the way down but I dont see those gulleys.

I find this surprising. Although large rocks can act as a sunshade preventing surface melt of the ice below.

Mike Jowsey, I recorded barbara Dreaver’s dribble the second time round on the repeat edition of the TVNZ main news at 7p.m. On a night when they lauded their longtime colleague (McDermott) for a well earnt award Based upon over 40 years of unbiased journalism we are lumbered with several minutes of the opposite end of that spectrum from Dreaver! In her usual style we are presented with falsehoods about how bad it is for low lying Pacific islands and how climate change is to blame. Then when she gets into the meat of her presentation she highlights the current plight as drought after talking about sea water inundating the fresh water supply of the Marshall Islands. According to Dreaver sicentists (unamed) are in agreement that this is significant and caused by by guess who. She didn’t directly say that as such but her worrying tone implied as much.

We wait with baited breath her announcement on high (sigh/snore). In the meantime our very concerned Prime Minister has pledged $5mil (NZ) to hold back the Pacific on the islander’s behalf. Nice! See we do care/sarc off.

Ian Cooper – well said. Dreaver is not a journalist, simply a reporter of hysteria-laden superstitions. The $5m of OUR money, as I understand it is more pragmatic than you say, though. It is for water storage and filtration plants. Good idea, methinks. Nothing to do with CAGW, just over-consumption of potable water supplies on the islands.

Chicken…a gold mining town of just 17 full-time residents and dozens of seasonal miners off the Taylor Highway, between Tok and the Canadian border…

….the federal agency said it decided to send in the task force armed and wearing body armor because of information it received from the Alaska State Troopers about “rampant drug and human trafficking going on in the area.”

———

Rampant drug use and human trafficking in a town of 17 residents?? Hell, I have classrooms that are worse than that! Methinks the Feds were pushing the envelope a bit….

Irony, serendipity, or apropos:
The science of Taphonomy, the study of the orderly decomposition of dead organisms, provides us with names for the various stages of decay, such as livor mortis and rigor mortis. These two stages define the physiological changes that occur immediately and shortly after death respectively.

The distinct stage when a dead organism begins to cool by losing heat to its surroundings is called algor mortis.

If soot is dark…
…and I never see the lumps of rock sitting on the top of the glacier sinking into the glacier,
but they are supposed to be hotter and therefore melting the ice so they should NOT be sitting on the top.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
HMMMmmm, I guess none of the scientists have ever watched what happens when you sand a road/drive and the ice becomes all pitted.

I am sure many of you have read the article Buzz Feed published today about our fearless leader and our fearless non-traditional efforts. I thought I would share a few thoughts that, of course, did not make it into the article.

As many of you already know, AG and climate change are one of the favorite piñatas for media and easy targets for headlines.

Always have been and always will be. In that stead, this particular piece was written with a narrative that the reporter had no interest in changing despite both GPG’s and my efforts to educate them on the great work of this team.

You would think Buzzfeed, of all places, would understand our approach to tackle this issue. But, alas, headlines are more important to and easier for them than writing about innovation and a community effort.

AG and Maggie have both read the article and are unwavering in their support of each of you and our strategy. As are the Climate Leaders and others who have weighed in the comment section to the article already.

So, when I invited Buzzfeed to join us this year, despite their viewpoint, to see our launch of bleeding edge digital tools like What I Love and join us again along with millions of others for 24 Hours of Reality and the launch of an innovative carbon too, I did it without any hesitation. And, they accepted.

This hasn’t been done before and we’re building something new together.

I can’t think of anything more inspiring than the opportunity to prove a naysayer wrong. And, I hope you find that inspiring too as we head into an action packed fall.